Exodus 17-30; Mark 1-2

Exodus
The Israelites continue their travels away from Egypt, often running into problems. In chapter 18 Jethro, Moses father-in-law, meets them and gives Moses some good advice on delegating.

Chapter 19 is the preparation of chapter 20. God is about to reveal Godself to the people. They need to get ready. Moses goes up and receives the commandments.

Now how many commandments there are is still debated. It is not clear if there are 10 or perhaps more, and different traditions of Christianity have counted them differently. There is a definite break in v. 18, though, which shows that the previous commandments (2-17) were of particular importance.

Chapter 21-23 are the beginning of what we call the Mosaic Law that forms the basis of the covenant God makes. Basically this is a contingent covenant as we see at the end of chapter 23..."If you do this, then I will do this."

Now some of the laws will sound strange. Anything that is too weird, make a note and we'll discuss it at our next meeting. Remember also that the focus of that society was around extended family relationships and the importance of having male children to carry on the bloodline. What would a society look like that followed this law? Is it just?

Chapter 24 tells us how the covenant is established. There is a ceremony in which blood is sprinkled on the altar (representing God) and upon the people (the Israelites). The root word for covenant is "to cut" - the meaning being "If I break this covenant, may I be cut up." Hence the blood, being the source of life (as well as death) is used to symbolize the seriousness of the covenant. It's power is also used as a kind of "detergent," sprinkled on important parts of the temple to show their holiness.

Chapter 25-28 is a description of and prescription for the making of the tabernacle (the mobile temple the Israelites used for their offerings until the time of Solomon), the ark of the covenant (if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you should know what that is) and the priests robes. Of course, it is a setting down in prose of construction instructions, which is not the easiest thing to read (imagine if someone wrote down the blueprint for even a simple building in words!). As you go I suggest you take a look here, since a picture is worth a thousand words. Remember, these are only artists impressions, but most of them follow the texts from Exodus.

Tabernacle pictures:
http://www.the-tabernacle-place.com/tabernacle_articles/what_is_the_tabernacle.aspx
http://www.bibleplaces.com/tabernacle.htm

Several pictures of the ark

High Priests robes:
http://biblia.com/jesusbible/priest-high13.jpg
http://www.domini.org/tabern/gif/highprst.gif

From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabernacle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_covenant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephod

Chapter 29 tells the story of how a priest was ordained. You will notice there are a lot of sacrifices, or offerings. This is a good time to understand and figure out what sacrifices meant to the Jewish people and how they were understood. What do you think they mean? How would you explain them? Why were sacrifices used in the worship of God?

Finally Chapter 30 describes the various parts of the tabernacle and their particular uses and prescriptions.

Mark
You'll notice right away that Mark moves quicker than Matthew. It is about half as long, there is not nativity story, the stories are much shorter than in Matthew. Many scholars believe Mark was the first Gospel written and that both Matthew and Luke used it as a major source, which is very likely.

In Mark Jesus is a man of action, we don't get the long discourses that we get in Matthew and later in John. Notice much of chapter 2 is devoted to food. There is an old Middle East proverb, "I saw them eating and I knew who they were." Who you ate with and how you ate told everyone around you what kind of person you were. Pay attention to how this gets played out as the gospel continues.